Looks like an interesting new book coming out by Peter Huber, THE BOTTOMLESS WELL: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy. I hope he explains the benefits of nuclear power (2). Someone should review this for the JLS….
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/3706/the-bottomless-well/
The Bottomless Well
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About 2/3 thru “Bottomless Well.” My reading is that bottomless well is not the supply of oil or any other natural resources capable of being used for fuel. The bottomless well is the human mind and its ingenuity. Destroy the entrepreneurial spirit of discovery with the deadening and ubsustainable yoke of central planning, and it will not how much oil we have in ground.
Travis Cork
Conway, SC
My favorite example has always been that vital strategic resource: Whale oil.
Practically overnight, petroleum erased a vital national concern. Imagine the vested interests now calling for restrictions on this upstart “Standard Oil” which endangers their livelyhoods!
Safe, clean nuclear power has been utterly styfled by government regulation. Where I lived in California, the cities around the San Francisco bay are building gigantic ziggarats of garbage because the so-called “clean air act” prevents clean efficient high-temperature incinerators from being built like are used in Europe. They generate electricity, and the metalics are recovered from the incinerators for recycling and reuse.
Oh, but Not In My Back Yard! Short sighted idiots who are very lucky the general population of California hasn’t figured out it’s the politicians and bureaucrats who are causing the electricity shortages and blackouts.
Why does “liberal (Austrian) thinking” have to support the idea of atomic energy?
I know that leftwing activists do take the opposition to the atomic industry as a banner for their fights… yet all those left-right differences may not always be so relevant here… since regulation in many countries makes out of atomic energy a State monopoly de facto.
Somebody has to argue here that’s not the problem: the economical issue is to liberalize the market, so it’s not a State monopoly anymore, so we get a better market situation where real technology improvement has a chance to be challenged…. A wishful thinking.
Yet to make the point of radiation damage and dissemination risks clearer, which often bothers the opponents, you have to take the other atomic energy market too: atomic weapons. Civil AND military institutions strive for the limitation of atomic risk. You can guess which has the priority. For the military, the idea is to use atomic devices in so-called “surgical” interventions. That’s well known since old Ronald Reagan praised the virtue of “limited nuclear warfare” in the 80′s but it’s a State secret when this should ever become reality.
The military is and always will be a “national” government issue, and that’s where they do the research on atomic energy in the first place …
You cannot effectively put the efficiency of that sort of energy in competition against another sort, since it is all State secret.
If you consider the atomic risks as an economical factor that has a cost, then you’d rather be forced to admit that the “low-cost” atomic industry today, issues bonds that it may not be able to pay back later… under government control. An old story.
Artisan: Would you mind elaborating a bit on what you mean when you say “Why does “liberal (Austrian) thinking” have to support the idea of atomic energy”? I think what you may mean is that Austrians advocate that the market be free to determine the course in that arena. Is your counter argument that’s fine in complete anarchy, where insurance costs and other risks would not be underwritten by the tax-payer at all, and therefore perhaps private firms and insurance companies would think twice about toying with (for sake of argument) such a dangerous source of energy. And since that risk and cost, perhaps, can still be externalized under today’s conditions, it should not be endorsed so quickly even by free market advocates. Is that what you’re saying?
Absolutely Paul, thank you for summarizing it so well.
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